Directions for Final Portfolio (.doc format) (.pdf format)
Cover page for Final Portfolio (.doc format) (.pdf format)
Reflection Letter Instructions for Final Portfolio (.pdf format)

Reflection Letter Instructions for Final Portfolio

Length: 2 pages, double-spaced

Due Date: December 1, 2006 (to be included in your final portfolio)

Format: Include a salutation (Dear Marie or Dear Cori), close (Sincerely), and your signature

The reflection letter provides an opportunity for you to think about the kinds of reading, writing, and interpretation that you’ve done this semester in English 302. It will help to provide a context for those reading your portfolio, so you might think of it as a kind of preface or introduction to your writing.

The basic premise of this letter is that it should be a sincere, thoughtful, and thorough attempt to reread what you have written for the course and to reflect on its meaning as a body of work.

Since you are writing this as a letter to your discussion leader, it can be less formal in tone than the papers themselves. Here are some of the questions that you may want to consider as you write your letter, although it is not necessary to address all of them:

• What kinds of discoveries have you made about the process of reading and interpreting texts, or what kinds of similarities have you noticed among the various kinds of interpretive tasks that you’ve been asked to perform this semester? Are there certain experiences or ways of approaching texts that are common to all of the materials you’ve encountered?
• Was there a writing assignment or interpretive task that you found particularly challenging or an interpretation problem that you were especially pleased to have been able to solve? Why was the project difficult, and how did you solve the problem?
• As you read through your papers in preparing to hand in the portfolio, is there an assignment or part of an assignment here of which you are particularly proud or that you believe is especially good? If so, why?
• Knowing what you now know after completing most of the course, is there an assignment that you might approach differently? Which one and why?
• Comment on the ways in which features of your writing have (or have not) changed over the course of the semester.
• Since you are both the author of and the initial audience for the papers in this portfolio, what features of your writing as a whole strike you as significant or important? What feature of these papers might be significant to you but less apparently significant to an impartial audience?

Please feel free to address other topics in writing your letter.